Thursday, June 07, 2007 Ng: Power consumption and global warming By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
IT all started with the hit documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” a film narrated by former presidential candidate, Al Gore, which tackles the effect of greenhouse gases on the world’s climate.
If we don’t start to protect our environment, we are going to increase the average temperature of the world, in effect forcing the melting of huge polar glaciers, which would in turn raise the water level of oceans and probably flood some of the low lying cities of the world.
The world press and population have now become very conscious.
Companies vie against each other over environment friendly practices. This is becoming even more paramount in the light of ever increasing fuel prices, which have more than doubled or tripled over five years ago.
This has also impacted the choice and design of many computer systems, which are increasingly becoming regular features in many offices and houses.
Computer systems are probably one the fastest growing consumers of electricity and power.
If you are thinking why over the last few years many desktop casings are seemingly growing in size while the components inside are getting less and less, and you end up buying a computer with a big box with mostly empty space inside, there is a reason.
Current computers sporting the latest processors, which are becoming faster by a factor of almost twice the speed every two years, are able to do that by increasing even more the transistors placed inside.
If you consider that the AM/FM radio set you listen to 30 years ago have less than 50 transistors, and that the latest processors have hundreds of millions of transistors, you can easily see why the latest processors are not only huge consumers of electricity but also big generators of heat.
I remember the first computer I had before, even when it has substantially more components, had a 120-watt power supply.
Right now, most computer casings have around 450- to 500-watt power supplies, and if you care to open the casing, you might note also that some computers even have two huge fans inside, which does nothing but make sure that the system does not overheat.
Make no bones about it — the processors and components might look smaller, but they simply consume more and more electricity, and generate ever increasing amounts of heat.
If you wonder why your office with the same 50 computers feel hotter nowadays compared to five years ago, it is not only because of the hot summer or global warming. These 50 computers which are faster are, on average, probably generating twice as much heat compared to earlier generation computers. As such, power consumption now is becoming one of the paramount considerations that is really important.
We don’t normally think about it before, but if you were an office or call center with about a hundred computers that are used extensively, and an air conditioning system to cool not only your people but also the heat generated by your computer systems, your electric bill can easily approach a hundred thousand pesos per month.
It was highlighted in various news reports that companies like Microsoft or Google, which operate hundreds of thousands of servers in a server farm to operate their websites and other services, are primarily focusing on locating these data centers in places like Colorado or Texas primarily to seek lower costs of electric power, or where they can use solar or wind or hydro power to further save on electric costs.
Power rates are now a more important consideration when setting up data centers because that is becoming one of the huge cost items in operations.
This made me ponder on the question a person posed to me before — why should I buy a computer that is branded when a computer clone can function in the same way? One of the answers is that a branded computer normally has better design and is optimized to produce results while a computer clone normally is done by assembling various units bought separately together (like chopsuey).
But one of the main reasons is also electric consumption. It starts with power supply. A bad power supply can eat up more electricity and generate heat and pass on probably only half of its electric consumption to its components.
A good power supply, on the other hand, can efficiently harness the electricity up to 80 to 90 percent efficiency.
You are penalized twice with a bad power supply or design. A computer with these problems consume almost twice as much electricity which is wasted as heat, and therefore you have to spend more as well to cool the system.
A computation made to me by a friend showed that when you buy well engineered systems, whether it be servers or desktops, it can probably cut your electric bill significantly, if not by almost half.
